After putting in over 100 hours in less than two months, to put it simply, I think Little-Known Galaxy is a perfect example of "I love this game, but..."
This is a slow-burn game. The progression pacing can feel like a crawl due to how long it takes to gather the resources to build up your infrastructure then move onto the next mission. However, there is very little time pressure aside from what you put on yourself, and I think that's part of what makes this a joy to play for me. There are no seasons to mess up your crop schedule by missing a day of watering your plants. If you don't make it to the next checkpoint in one day because you got unlucky, there's always tomorrow. Your tools also take time to upgrade, but that's okay because you can always go do something else in the meantime and you don't really lose anything for taking some days off.
That said, it does not excuse how slow the game feels to control. Your character moves very slowly compared to many other games, and while you can eventually get used to it (and also get to buy a hoverboard in the middle of the game to go marginally faster), that feeling of walking through molasses never quite goes away. Combined with the fact that animations also feel cumbersome at times, and there's a reason why this happens to be one of the biggest critiques against the game.
Let's go to some positives now. I think most of the characters are incredibly charming (some are a bit one-note in my opinion, but not unlikeable), and the space-faring setting is a breath of fresh air that helps LKG stand out from its peers. The game also plays it very safe in terms of maturity - there are basically no hidden dark undertones, only sunshine and rainbows, which isn't unwelcome in a cozy game but potentially may make the world feel shallow to people. The only exception that I remember is that a couple on the ship occasionally talk about the hard times they had growing up on a war-torn planet, but the characters don't linger on their past as if the trauma still actively affects them (no edgy guys here).
The gameplay loop is very simple. 90% of the time, you spend your days going down to the various planet surfaces to gather resources, effectively the mining portion of other similar games. Before you do, you will likely spend your mornings taking care of your "farm", which is the main way you will be making money. The power system in this game is a fairly interesting limitation to plan around, as your infrastructure will have to take into consideration how much power you are able to use on actually planting your crops vs powering machines to make your yields more valuable before selling. I went a little nuts and made an entire spreadsheet for this, but there's really no need to min-max. Again, time is not a pressure factor unless you allow it to be. The other 10% of the time, you are running around chatting up the NPCs and collecting microbes, mainly because you are in the process of space travel and so don't have a planet to scavenge. Some people apparently hate the microbe catching or find it too difficult baseline - I think it's a fun little rhythm minigame to break up the resource grind, but there are settings in the options menu to make them easier or turn them off entirely.
Back to some personal criticisms though. First of all, I feel that by the time I actually got a good infrastructure up and running, the main storyline was suddenly over. It's a crying shame, because I think most people would stop playing the game after the credits roll, so it almost feels like going to distance to plan a satisfying farm layout isn't worthwhile if your goal is to "finish the game".
Secondly, the economy feels... kinda bad? You're not particularly incentivized to plant anything fancier than Soybeans (available starting from the very first planet) or make use of value-enhancing machines obtained later than the Canning Pot (which I got after finishing my first quarter, along with the Juicer which is another insanely good machine), as most other things simply don't compare in terms of profit efficiency. Not even getting the kitchen upgrade helps in this aspect, as the sell price for most cooked food in this game is just not really worth the time spent growing the ingredients, and you can cheaply churn out energy tonics and vitamins to replenish your energy instead. I'd love if the economy got rebalanced, as I think the rotating crop variety for each planet is really fun, only to find out that you really should just plant the one obvious money-maker and grow only the bare minimum needed of everything else to progress the missions.
Lastly, it feels like there are a bunch of crops that simply don't have much you can do with them (Beans and Garlic can only be used in cooked food, Jute and Cotton are only used to make different kinds of fabric, which are only used to make decorations), which makes them very disappointing even to experiment with. It kind of feels like there was more content planned that never made it into the final product.
At the end of the day, I really enjoyed my time with Little-Known Galaxy, enough to where I'm planning on doing more playthroughs beyond my first (which I'm still in the process of getting 100% achievements in). But this is not a game for everyone. I encourage people to try out the demo first before committing to buying it, because it is an excellent gauge for how you may feel for an entire playthrough.
